Separately, The Jerusalem Post quoted Israeli officials as saying the Indian counter-terrorist forces are well trained but sufficient intelligence was not gathered before engaging the terrorists.

Indian military and police commandos, who have been battling the terrorists since they went on their killing spree Wednesday, concentrated their operation Friday on freeing hostages held by the gunmen at the Chabad House, a Jewish center in the fashionable and upscale Nariman Point. The place, among other buildings owned by the Jewish community, is a favorite of Israeli tourists.

In urgent matters of national survival and geopolitics, words matter. The still generally unchallenged language referring provocatively to an Israeli “Occupation” always overlooks the pertinent and incontestable history of the West Bank (Judea/Samaria) and Gaza.
A topographical map of Israel, delineating the 1967 borders.
Photo: Courtesy
Perhaps the most evident omission concerns the unwitting manner in which these “Territories” fell into Israel’s hands in the first place. It is simply and widely disregarded that “occupation” followed the multi-state Arab aggression of 1967 – one never disguised by Egypt, Syria or Jordan.

A sovereign state of Palestine did not exist before 1967 or 1948. Nor was a state of Palestine ever promised by UN Security Council Resolution 242. Contrary to popular understanding, a state of Palestine has never existed. Never.

Even as a nonstate legal entity, “Palestine” ceased to exist in 1948, when Great Britain relinquished its League of Nations mandate. During the 1948-49 Israeli War of Independence (a war of survival fought because the entire Arab world had rejected the authoritative United Nations resolution creating a Jewish state), the West Bank and Gaza came under the illegal control of Jordan and Egypt respectively. These Arab conquests did not put an end to an already-existing state or to an ongoing trust territory. What these aggressions did accomplish was the effective prevention, sui generis, of a state of Palestine. The original hopes for Palestine were dashed, therefore, not by the new Jewish state or by its supporters, but by the Arab states, especially Jordan and Egypt.

LET US return to an earlier history. From the Biblical Period (ca. 1350 BCE to 586 BCE) to the British Mandate (1918 – 1948), the land named by the Romans after the ancient Philistines was controlled only by non-Palestinian elements. Significantly, however, a continuous chain of Jewish possession of the land was legally recognized after World War I, at the San Remo Peace Conference of April 1920. There, a binding treaty was signed in which Great Britain was given mandatory authority over “Palestine” (the area had been ruled by the Ottoman Turks since 1516) to prepare it to become the “national home for the Jewish People.” Palestine, according to the Treaty, comprised territories encompassing what are now the states of Jordan and Israel, including the West Bank and Gaza. Present-day Israel comprises only 22 percent of Palestine as defined and ratified at the San Remo Peace Conference.

In 1922, Great Britain unilaterally and without any lawful authority split off 78 percent of the lands promised to the Jews – all of Palestine east of the Jordan River – and gave it to Abdullah, the non-Palestinian son of the Sharif of Mecca. Eastern Palestine now took the name Transjordan, which it retained until April 1949, when it was renamed as Jordan. From the moment of its creation, Transjordan was closed to all Jewish migration and settlement, a clear betrayal of the British promise in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and a patent contravention of its Mandatory obligations under international law.

On July 20, 1951, a Palestinian Arab assassinated King Abdullah for the latter’s hostility to Palestinian aspirations and concerns. Regarding these aspirations, Jordan’s “moderate” King Hussein – 19 years later, during September 1970 – brutally murdered thousands of defenseless Palestinians under his jurisdiction.

IN 1947, several years prior to Abdullah’s killing, the newly-formed United Nations, rather than designate the entire land west of the Jordan River as the long-promised Jewish national homeland, enacted a second partition. Curiously, considering that this second fission again gave complete advantage to Arab interests, Jewish leaders accepted the painful judgment. The Arab states did not. On May 15, 1948, exactly 24 hours after the State of Israel came into existence, Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, declared to a tiny new country founded upon the ashes of the Holocaust: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.”

This unambiguous declaration has been at the very heart of all subsequent Arab orientations toward Israel, including those of “moderate” Fatah. Even by the strict legal standards of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Arab actions and attitudes toward the microscopic Jewish state in their midst has remained patently genocidal. For some reason, this persistence has repeatedly been made to appear benign.

IN 1967, almost 20 years after Israel’s entry into the community of nations, the Jewish state, as a result of its unexpected military victory over Arab aggressor states, gained unintended control over the West Bank and Gaza. Although the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war is codified in the UN Charter, there existed no authoritative sovereign to whom the Territories could be “returned.” Israel could hardly have been expected to transfer them back to Jordan and Egypt, which had exercised unauthorized and terribly cruel control since the Arab-initiated war of “extermination” in 1948-49. Moreover, the idea of Palestinian “self-determination” had only just begun to emerge after the Six Day War, and – significantly – had not even been included in UN Security Council Resolution 242, which was adopted on November 22, 1967.

For their part, the Arab states convened a summit in Khartoum in August 1967, concluding: “No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it….” The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed three years earlier, in 1964, before there were any “Israeli Occupied Territories.” Exactly what was it, therefore, that the PLO sought to “liberate” between 1964 and 1967?

This question should now be raised in connection with the US-sponsored “Road Map To Peace in the Middle East,” a twisted cartography leading to “Palestine.”

THIS HAS been a very brief account of essential historic reasons why the so-called “Palestinian Territories” are not occupied by Israel. Several other equally valid reasons stem from Israel’s inherent legal right to security and self-defense. International law is not a suicide pact. Because a Palestinian state would severely threaten the very existence of Israel – a fact that remains altogether unhidden in Arab media and governments – the Jewish State is under no binding obligation to end a falsely alleged “Occupation.” No state can ever be required to accept complicity in its own dismemberment and annihilation.

Both Israel and the United States will soon have new leadership. Neither Jerusalem nor Washington should be deceived by the so-called “Road Map To Peace in the Middle East,” a twisted bit of highway that makes entirely inaccurate claims about “Palestinian Territories” and “Israeli Occupation.” For substantially documented reasons of history and national security, it is imperative that a twenty-third Arab state never be carved out of the still-living body of Israel.

A topographical map of Israel, delineating the 1967 borders.
Photo: Courtesy
If anyone should still have doubts about Palestinian intentions, they need look only to former Prime Minister Sharon’s “disengagement” from Gaza, an area that is now used by Hamas to stage rocket attacks upon Israeli noncombatants, and by al-Qaeda to mount future terrorist operations against American cities.

Truth about Islamic Iranian Ahmadinejad’s Genocide Call to wipe off Israel and the “Palestinian” support for it

Debunking Juan Cole’s argument!

Ahmadinejad Was Not Mistranslated
June 17, 2008 – 11:32 am
A new study by Joshua Teitelbaum of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs sets out to refute the claim that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders are being misquoted when they call for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.

As the executive summary states: “What emerges from a comprehensive analysis of what Ahmadinejad actually said – and how it has been interpreted in Iran – is that the Iranian president was not just calling for ‘regime change’ in Jerusalem, but rather the actual physical destruction of the State of Israel . When Ahmadinejad punctuates his speech with ‘Death to Israel’ (marg bar Esraiil ), this is no longer open to various interpretations.”

(Nytimes research debukes Juan Cole and others who tried to claim that Ahmadinejad did “not” call on Israel to be wiped off)
Just How Far Did They Go, Those Words Against Israel? – New York Times… But translators in Tehran who work for the president’s office and the foreign ministry disagree with them. All official translations of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statement, including a description of it on his Web site (www.president.ir/eng/), refer to wiping Israel away. …When combined with Iran’s longstanding support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah of Lebanon, two groups that have killed numerous Israelis, and Mr. Ahmadinejad’s refusal to acknowledge the Holocaust, it is hard to argue that, from Israel’s point of view, Mr. Ahmadinejad poses no threat. Still, it is true that he has never specifically threatened war against Israel.
So did Iran’s president call for Israel to be wiped off the map? It certainly seems so. Did that amount to a call for war? That remains an open question.
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran for this article.http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/weekinreview/11bronner.html?ex=1307678400&en=efa2bd266224e880& amp;ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Ahmadinejad: Israel’s “annihilation” is a necessary part of the “historic war” between Islam & the West (Al Jazeera).

Since Ahmadinejad’s call to “wipe Israel off the map” last October, some academics have claimed the Iranian leader was mistranslated or misunderstood.

“Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map, because no such idiom exists in Persian,” left-wing University of Michigan professor Juan Cole told the New York Times. “He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse… Since Iran has not attacked another country aggressively for over a century, I smell the whiff of war propaganda.”

Jonathan Steele of the British Guardian newspaper also told the Times: “The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran’s first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that ‘this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,’ just as the Shah’s regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The ‘page of time’ phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon.”

Neither of the two have responded to Ahmadinejad’s latest clarification and call to action, which were translated and distributed by the Iranian state-run IRNA news agency.

Was Wiping Israel Off the Map a Misquote? – Michael Rubin (National Review)
Some academics and policymakers bend over backwards to convince themselves and others that Iranian President Ahmadinejad does not mean what he says.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) argued that the proper translation of Ahmadinejad’s quotes is the subject of debate and that translations used were either misquoted or out of context. It’s a line which originated with Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor, who wrote: “This idiom does not exist in Persian, and that what Ahmadinejad actually said was, ‘This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.'” But here, the Islamic Republic provides its own clarification. In its official translations, it headlined Ahmadinejad’s call to “wipe Israel off the map.”

(“Moderate Palestinian”) Fatah agrees: Wipe out IsraelIn a leaflet published by Fatah’s Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the group stressed its … who called with all honesty to wipe Israel off the map of the world. …http://www.jnewswire.com/article/727

Osama Hamdan, the Hamas representative in Lebanon, told Iranian television that suicide bombing attacks against Israel were justified, especially attacks in buses. He rejected the historical Jewish connection to the Land of Israel and stated that Hamas’ avowed intention was to wipe Israel off the face of the map.

In a November 2005 leaflet, the Brigades expressed support for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s call “to wipe Israel off [the] world map.” “We stress our support of the Iranian President’s position toward the fictitious Zionist state, which will disappear with the help of Allah,”

Israel Gov’t Minister Favors (restricted immigration) Selective Aliyah… Nov. 24, 2008, He specifically referred to a rise in cases of neo-Nazism among Russian immigrants, some one million of which immigrated to Israel in the past 16 years. Three to four hundred thousand of the Russian immigrants are non-Jews recruited by the Jewish Agency using Jewish donor funds.http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/124103

Searchlight Magazine: A man who claims to be one of Israel’s leading intellectuals is also a Swedish antisemitic writer. Israel Shamir presents himself on his website as a leading Russian-Israeli intellectual and a writer, translator and journalist. But in 2001 he changed his name to Jöran Jermas and has surrounded himself in Sweden and Norway … (An empty bag cannot stand) and was published by the openly nazi publisher Nordiska Förlaget.http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/index.php?link=template&story=6

I make no comment here on the rights and wrongs of the Israeli-Arab conflict, or the appalling historical episode of which Mrs Allaf writes; I merely refer you to the source whose judgement Mrs Allaf proffers. “Israel Shamir” is the nom de plume of a writer whose real name is Jöran Jermas. So far from being, as he claims, a leading Israeli intellectual and translator, Shamir is of Russian origin, and has lived in Sweden for the past 20 years. His writings, which are widely circulated on the Internet, are unambiguously antisemitic.http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2005/08/chatham_house_o.html

ISM… a Swedish antisemite (See: “Israeli writer is Swedish anti-Semite”) who also passes himself off as a “Jew” (all the better to make propaganda). Known widely as the “toxic dwarf” (extreme antisemite plus low intellect), Israel Shamir (also known as Joran Jermas) is such an awful antisemite that even some pro-Palestinian Arab/anti-Zionist activists have rejected him. Read “Sue has seen the light” for more details. According to the now infamous Marxist anti-Zionist Dr. Sue Blackwell, Shamir is a Nazihttp://universityracism.multiservers.com/Text/AntisemSWE.htm

…informed about the antisemitic book “Flowers of Galilee” of a swedish-russian antisemite who converted to be a greek orthodox and spreads his poison under the name of Israel Shamir, he changed in few years in Sweden his name twice. He was called Jöran Jermas, now his name is Adam Ermash.

Israel Shamir, the “Israeli-Jewish” enemy of Zionism (and now of Judaism too) has a secret identity which he won’t deny or speak about. He just smears his critics. Here is photgraphic evidence that Shamir, the darling of White Supremacists… and other racists is a Swedish bloke called Joram Jermas.

responses to racism and antisemitism…
In early February, the extreme left-wing party Rød Valgallianse (Red Electoral Alliance − RV) demanded that one of its local politicians, the teacher Hans Olav Brendberg, withdraw from the party due to numerous antisemitic statements he had made on the Norwegian Internet discussion forum KK-forum and to his close ties with Israeli anti-Zionist Israel Shamir.http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2004/norway.htm

Israel Shamir… is a fringe character who apparently once tried to enter into a business arrangement for the sale of Nazi memorabilia with the notorious British Holocaust denier David Irving. Irving’s web site includes his very curious correspondence with Shamir, and there is independent confirmation that Shamir was indeed involved in such schemes. (London Times, September 1, 1998; Evening News (Edinburgh), September 1, 1998)
If that were not enough, Shamir, who usually adopts a left wing persona for his harangues against Israel, has also written for extreme right-wing periodicals in Russia under the name Robert David, even denouncing Andre Sakharov as a “Zionist agent.” Thus, according to the late Israeli Sovietologist Mikhail Agursky, a right wing Russian journal known as Politika featured an article:
.. written by one Robert David denouncing [Andre] Sakharov. The article is full of allegations that Sakharov was a harmful Zionist agent. Robert David is presented as an “Israeli”. His identity is well known. As Israel Shamir (Shmerling), he came to Israel in the late 1960s from Novosibirsk and soon became an extreme leftist.
.. Shamir now lives in Moscow under the name Robert David; and, under his own name, he now loses no opportunity to claim that Zionists are the worst enemy of the Russian people, and to call Russian liberals Zionist agents.. He glorified Saddam Hussein and indirectly calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.
.. Shamir is not only in open friendly relations with Iraq and Arab terrorist organizations, but also actively participates in the campaign to delegitimize Israel. (Jerusalem Post, August 15, 1991) http://camera.org/index.asp?x_context=8&x_nameinnews=92&x_article=154

It’s not the first time Israel Shamir has been promoted by an extremist self-styled “traditionalist” Catholic. Back in July we had noted E. Michael Jones’ “Culture Wars’ Troubling Praise of Israel Shamir” (Fringewatch July 3, 2006) and Shamir’s own controversial reputation among the left. Apparently once a darling of the Palestinian cause, his anti-semitism proved so toxic that he was deemed a public relations disaster and eventually disowned by his comrades (See Nigel Parry’s The Israel Shamir Case and Roland Rance’s Israel Shamir: Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?, from the Socialist Viewpoint). One might get a sense of Shamir’s worldview by his conclusion from his recent essay that:
Armed with Schmitt’s thesis and Bauer’s testimony, we may conclude: “the ‘liberal democracy and human rights’ doctrine carried by the US marines across the Tigris and the Oxus is a form of secularised Judaism. Considering the predominance of Jews…
Shamir’s writings are similar to that of other anti-semites: society’s ills perceived through the lens of a global Zionist conspiracy, “Talmudic” (or in some cases, secular) Judaism set against Christian civilization.http://www.ratzingerfanclub.com/blog/2007/01/carl-schmitt-israel-shamir-and-robert.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. federal jury convicted a Syrian arms dealer and a co-defendant on Thursday of conspiring to sell $1 million in weapons…Monzer al-Kassar, 62, a longtime resident of Spain known as the “Prince of Marbella” for his lifestyle in the glitzy seaside town… Kassar has been selling weapons since the 1970s to the Palestinian Liberation Front and clients in Nicaragua, Bosnia, Croatia, Iran, Iraq and Somalia.
In 1995, Kassar was tried and acquitted of supplying arms that were used in the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship of the coast of Egypt. That resulted in the death of a wheelchair-bound Jewish-American, Leon Klinghoffer.
Klinghoffer’s two daughters, who sat through Kassar’s trial in New York, told reporters they felt vindicated by the verdict.
“Even though this case was not about the Achille Lauro, I wanted everyone there to know that my father was in the courtroom,” Lisa Klinghoffer said.
(Additional reporting by Grant McCool; Editing by Daniel Trotta and Anthony Boadle)